Employers warned about surveillance

AUCKLAND: Bosses beware: if you think your company will benefit from surveilling employees who work from home, think again.

That is the message from Auckland University of Technology professor of human resource management Jarrod Haar, who oversaw the first major survey of remote workers in the age of Covid19.

Just more than 1000 employees were surveyed in the first month of lockdown; about 250 were surveyed one month later.

As working from home (WFH) became the norm for many employees, efforts to monitor their activities were also becoming normalised, Prof Haar says.

Reports suggest growing numbers of companies are using different approaches, including technology, to track how much time remote workers are spending on the job.

Prof Haar’s study shows that just after New Zealand’s first Covid19 lockdown, employees felt their organisations were more likely to be surveilling them; 52% reported they believed this was happening to some extent.

Nearly twothirds of the employees (62%) said the most common surveillance came in the form of their supervisor checking on them ‘‘to control my task completion’’.

Employees also believed they were being surveilled through online monitoring — but at a lower rate (46%).

Online monitoring is certainly on the rise. The maker of one remotemonitoring tool, Hubstaff (which can also be used for time incrementbased billing), said sales had tripled since the nationwide lockdown in April.

Like many such programmes, which run discreetly in the background, every few minutes Hubstaff takes a snapshot of the websites employees have browsed, the documents they have open and the social media sites they have visited. If it is on their cellphones, too, it will use GPS coordinates to track whether they leave their home offices.

Prof Haar’s study found that those who felt ‘‘spied on’’ were more likely to put in some extra effort at work — but they were also more likely to consider job hunting, and they suffered higher anxiety, depression and stress.

Fundamentally, New Zealand managers appeared to be struggling with the WFH boom and

❛ Employers are required to inform staff

if they are collecting personal information in

the form of workmonitoring software

were seeking new ways to keep tabs on their workforces, Prof Haar said.

He said this clash of cultures — the preCovid19 ‘‘checking up on’’ employees and the postCovid19 ‘‘checking in with’’ them — could be problematic for individuals and organisations.

‘‘The study shows attempts to monitor employees’ WFH activities have more drawbacks than advantages, harking back to the old days of companies trying to command and control,’’ he said.

‘‘Simply put, if organisations want to get the best of out their people, they need to trust them.’’

He acknowledged the challenges of moving from a high visibility, officebased approach to a low visibility, remote approach to work.

However, employees’ perceptions of how much their organisation cared about their wellbeing and trusted them were vital to their own sense of happiness at work.

‘‘There is clear evidence that employees expect their company to trust them and not apply any ‘Big Brother’ mentality to their work from home,’’ Prof Haar said.

‘‘Fundamentally, businesses that engage in such surveillance are eroding their workers’ trust and mental health — at a time when both are needed more than ever.’’

What are employees’ rights?

Do New Zealand employers have to inform staff if the software that monitors their work is in place?

A spokesman for the Privacy Commission said ‘‘employers are required to inform staff if they are collecting personal information in the form of workmonitoring software’’.

Employers had to be clear about what information was being collected, what it would be used for and who it would be shared with.

‘‘Employers should only collect information if it is necessary to fulfil a lawful purpose,’’ the spokesman said.

‘‘Collecting masses of extraneous personal information to confirm that your staff are working prescribed hours or completing required tasks may be unnecessary and raise issues under the Privacy Act.’’

‘‘We recommend employers consider whether they could achieve the same policy intent with less intrusive mechanisms.’’ — The New Zealand Herald